Hotel Royal Hotel Royal

Mensagem do Realizador Director Statement
There’s no need to reinvent the world, paying close attention is enough. ‘In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest at the hotel and observed through the details, lives that will remain unknown.’ says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualised quotidian. Hotel Royal exposes itself as a set of simple rules of formal and structural restrictions to present us with a fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. As a peepshow Hotel Royal explores the horrors of the soul or simply the distant observation of the misfits. The rooms are all the same… people are all the same. We all have identical biological bodies, but we pair people, groups, cultures, policies and identities that are nevertheless different. Where is the resemblance and where is the dissemblance? Where is fiction and where is reality. And what to do with the problems shared by both in representation? Hotel works on notions of intimacy, vulnerability and intrusion when establishing and crossing the limits of the public and private sphere. Whether or not intentionally, the filmic device generates feelings of seclusion/participation in a viewer who feels a desired guest but also an intruder. Sentimental, intense and occasionally traumatic spaces are created. All banal or extraordinary objects will thus be imbued with allegorical qualities. Hotel Royal produces a sort of fiction of the intimacy. The viewer becomes accomplice of the voyeurism – compelled, too, from the need to move without being observed, through the private sphere of the other, compelled to cultivate his/her own interior narratives. – A social experience of subjective production. Nothing is poorer than the truth expressed as a thought.

Biografia do Realizador Director Biography

Salomé Lamas (Lisbon) studied cinema in Lisbon and Prague, visual arts in Amsterdam and is a Ph. D candidate in contemporary art studies in Coimbra. Her work has been screened both in art venues and film festivals such as Berlinale, BAFICI, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, FIAC, MNAC – Museu do Chiado, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Fid Marseille, Arsenal Institut fur film und videokunst, Viennale, Culturgest, CCB – Centro Cultural de Belém, Hong Kong FF, Museu Serralves, Tate Modern, CPH: DOX, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Bozar , Tabakalera, ICA London, TBA 21 Foundation, Mostra de São Paulo, CAC Vilnius, MALBA, FAEMA, SESC São Paulo, MAAT, La Biennale di Venezia Architettura, among others. Lamas was granted several fellowships such as the Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship – Harvard University, Film Study Center-Harvard Fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Brown Foundation – Dora Maar House, Fundación Botín, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Sundance, Bogliasco Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Camargo Foundation, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. She collaborates with Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola. She collaborates with the production company O Som e a Fúria and is represented by Galeria Miguel Nabinho and Kubikgallery. salomelamas.info

Distribuição Distribution
AGÊNCIA – Portuguese Short Film Festival Distributor Portugal All Rights